Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Fabian Samuel Tillier

Thomas Fahrig

Enhanced message passing architectures and libraries include an interruptible wait feature. After a thread X calls a completion-awaiting routine of a message passing interface library, a progress engine executes while the routine is in the blocked condition. A thread Y interrupts the routine before all messaging operations are completed. The interrupted routine returns control to thread X with an indication that the routine's completion condition is unsatisfied. The completion-awaiting routine may have the same function signature as a standard MPI routine. In some cases, thread Y interrupts the routine while requesting a lock held by thread X. In some applications, thread X is a communication thread and thread Y is one of multiple worker threads. The interruptible wait feature may be joined by an asynchronous callback feature, which associates a callback with a deterministic execution context.

Messaging interruptible blocking wait with serialization

One embodiment illustrated herein includes a method that may be practiced in a computing environment. The method includes acts for providing direct access to hardware to virtual machines. The method includes determining that a virtual machine should have access to a piece of hardware. The method further includes a virtual machine requesting access to the hardware from the host wherein a host is a special partition that controls the physical hardware of a computing system and manages virtual machines. The method further includes the host configuring the hardware to allow access to the hardware directly by the virtual machine by the host mapping hardware resources into the virtual machine's address space. The method further includes the virtual machine directly accessing the hardware without going through the host once the hardware has been configured by the host.

Application acceleration in a virtualized environment

Through an asynchronous callback enhancement, a thread makes a non-blocking request (e.g., send, receive, I/O) to a message passing interface library, and a callback routine is associated with the request as an asynchronous callback to the thread. The callback is queued for execution in the requesting thread and so has a deterministic execution context. Callback queuing may occur in response to another thread detecting that the request is complete. Further control over callback execution is provided by state transitions which determine whether the thread is open to processing (e.g., executing) an asynchronous callback. Callback association is done by a broad or by narrow association routines. An application which has processes organized in ranks, each including a communication thread with associated callback(s), and multiple worker threads. Interruptible wait enhancements may also be present.

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Portland, OR, United States of America

Fabian Samuel Tillier